Why is my speed lower than what I pay for?

Advertised plans are the maximum the line can carry under ideal conditions. Wi-Fi interference, distance from the router, other devices on the network, and congestion at peak times all reduce what a single device actually gets.

Below 30 ms is excellent and fine for competitive gaming. Between 30 and 80 ms is comfortable for video calls and general use. Above 150 ms makes real-time applications feel sluggish.

Internet Speed Test — Check Download, Upload and Ping Speed

Reading your results

Three numbers matter, and they matter for different reasons. Download speed decides how fast pages, video and files arrive. Upload speed decides how you appear on a video call and how quickly backups and large attachments leave your machine. Ping decides how responsive everything feels, regardless of raw bandwidth.

How much download speed do you actually need?

Activity	Comfortable speed
Email, messaging, browsing	5 Mbps
HD video streaming	10 Mbps per stream
4K video streaming	25 Mbps per stream
Video calls, one participant	5 Mbps up and down
Online gaming	10 Mbps, but ping matters far more
Busy household, four or more people	100 Mbps and up

Notice how modest most of these are. Beyond roughly 100 Mbps, extra bandwidth rarely makes a household feel faster — latency and Wi-Fi coverage do far more for the experience.

Ping and jitter

Ping is the round trip time for one small packet. Jitter is how much that time wobbles between packets. Steady jitter under 10 ms is what keeps a video call smooth; a low average ping with large jitter still produces stuttering audio.

Getting a faster result

Use a cable if you can. Ethernet removes the single biggest source of variance.
Move closer to the router. Two walls can halve a Wi-Fi signal.
Prefer the 5 GHz band. Faster and far less congested than 2.4 GHz, at shorter range.
Turn off the VPN. Encryption and a longer route both cost throughput.
Test at different hours. Shared connections slow down in the evening peak.
Check the hardware. An older router or a device on Wi-Fi 4 caps everything behind it.

If the numbers are still far below your plan after all that, run the test on a wired device and call your provider with the results. A wired test they cannot blame on Wi-Fi is the fastest way to get a line fault taken seriously.

Why browser tests differ from app tests

This test runs entirely in your browser over standard HTTPS, which is exactly how ordinary web traffic behaves. Dedicated desktop apps can open more parallel connections and squeeze out a higher peak number. The browser figure is usually closer to what you experience day to day.